Joe's Cyber Space

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0226/hentoff.phpYou would think this grassroots movement to secure our liberties would be of interest to the national media, but I have seen little of it on television or in the print press. To find out about these campaigns around the country, and about a range of organizing tools, you can visit the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee's Web site, and its links: http://www.gjf.org/NBORDC

Bush Hears Voices in His Head That Tell Him to Kill People - Claims God is Talking to Him!

Did Bush Say God Told Him To Go To War?
Published on Monday, June 30, 2003 by CommonDreams.org by Ira Chernus
Did God tell George W. Bush to strike at Al-Qaeda and Iraq? God only knows. Did Bush SAY that God told him to strike? We don't know yet, for sure. But we damn well better find out. Because if George W. said it, he-and all of us-could be in for some big trouble.

If Bush lets God make foreign policy decisions, is he violating not just the spirit but the letter of the law? The Constitution gives him the right to make foreign policy. It does not say what should or should not go through his mind in the process. It certainly does not forbid him from consulting God. But it does protect us from having any religious belief determine our laws and policies. Did Bush violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state? The answer is not totally clear.

It is crystal clear, though, that another part of the Constitution has been violated. It is absolutely unconstitutional for the president to let God tell him to take the country to war-not because the president is forbidden to consult God, but because the president is forbidden to take the country to war. Only Congress can declare war.

If Bush's conversations with God led to war, it is Congress that bears the greatest blame. Congress gave Bush a blank check. Bush never asked for a declaration of war against Al-Qaeda or Iraq. Congress ducked its responsibility, rolled over eagerly, and gave away its Constitutional duty to make those decisions.

So let's demand that Bush tell us what he said to Mahmoud Abas. If he really did say that God tells him when and where to strike, let's spread our outrage around. Let's hold Congress as well as the president responsible for dereliction of their democratic duty. At the same time, let's face the fact that many of our fellow citizens won't be outraged, and learn how to persuade them they should be.

And while we focus, quite rightly, on Bush and God, let's not forget to ask the president
another question: Do you really plan to forget about Middle East peace next year, because
you will be too busy trying to get re-elected. Is that the kind of president we want? -Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He
can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu

The Iraq/Africa uranium report was a deliberate formulation of a deception for a specific purpose, with thousands of lives and the US's credibility in the balance....the White House took the CIA's warnings (that the report had no validity) and deliberately sought a way in which Bush could assert what he knew to be questionable while leaving himself an "out" should it later be shown the intelligence was garbage he was warned it might be. -washingtondispatch.com/

So... CBS has learned that Bush knew the intelligence regarding attempted uranium purchases by Iraq was questionable - But Bush deliberately sought to find a way in which he could present to the American people incomplete information that would secure their support for his sending US soldiers to their deaths - but that would also provide him plausible deniability later! -MWO

Mama Mia, What a Con! How the Italians - perhaps with U.S. neocon help - suckered the Brits into believing and promoting the African-uranium fable
TBTM Commentary by Dennis Hans
Back in February, I began cataloging the "techniques of deceit" the Bush administration was employing to sell the public on the need to invade and occupy Iraq

.....Let us drop the sarcasm long enough to tip our hat to the Bushies for pulling off not one but possibly two splendid "hidden-hand third-party verification" cons: It appears that they used Italian intelligence agents, highly skilled in the art of producing misleading summaries, as a credible third party to con the Brits, and they most definitely used the Brits as a credible third party to con America. By keeping the Brits barefoot and clueless, the Bushies made it possible for the Brits to make and presumably believe this assertion in its September 24 dossier: "...Iraq's known holdings of processed uranium are under IAEA supervision. But there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa. ..."..the Bushies masterfully executed my patented "hidden-hand third-party verification" con, using the unwitting Brits to con the U.S. media, public and Congress....

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/howtoimpeach.html
Bush is IMPEACHABLE because He's UNDER OATH.
TBTM Commentary by a Symbolman
A strong legal case for impeachment exists. However, impeachment is only quasi-legal.
Impeachment is really a political act. Therefore, the question arises whether these kinds of crimes " from the result of lying " should be the basis for presidential impeachment. Given Republican control of Congress, Republican beliefs regarding presidential lying are of real import.

Here is what several Republicans said to Congress in the context of Mr. Clinton"s impeachment:...

Rather than lying about immaterial matters, Mr. Bush lied about the most important matters imaginable, whether to send Americans to their deaths while killing citizens of another country. If Mr. Clinton should have been removed from office for his purported lies, then Mr. Bush " if he really did lie " should be removed from office and subsequently prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html
July 6, 2003
What I Didn't Find in Africa
By JOSEPH C. WILSON 4th -Joseph C. Wilson 4th, United States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, is an international business consultant.
WASHINGTON

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

....questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons. (more)

Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document - now known to be a crude forgery - that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.

What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.

Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." What the president did not say was that the British were relying on their intelligence white paper, which was based on the same false information that Wilson and the U.S. ambassador to Niger had already debunked. "That information was erroneous, and they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address," Wilson said Sunday on "Meet the Press."

In order to believe that our president was not lying to us, we must believe that this information did not find its way through Cheney's office to the Oval Office.

In media interviews, Wilson said it was the vice president's questioning that pushed the CIA to try to find a credible Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency had determined there wasn't one. "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times. "A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."

In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, "It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?" Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to face after the dictator invaded Kuwait.

This is not some minor dispute over a footnote to history but rather raises the possibility of one of the most egregious misrepresentations by a U.S. administration. What could be more cynical and impeachable than fabricating a threat of rogue nations or terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons and using that to sell a war?

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=800
More Evidence Bush Misled Nation
07/07/2003 @ 5:37pm
The day before Independence Day, Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading a review of the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, held a series of interviews with journalists and revealed that his unfinished inquiry had so far found that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been somewhat ambiguous, that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence services had received pressure from the Bush administration, and that the CIA had not found any proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.

Though Kerr did not say so outright, his findings indicate that there was no hard-and-fast intelligence that Iraq possessed ready-to-go chemical or biological weapons. Yet that is what Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Ari Fleischer and other administration officials had asserted repeatedly. In his interviews, Kerr remarked that US intelligence analysts were right to assume, based on older evidence and more recent circumstantial material, that Iraq was maintaining its unconventional weapons programs. But developing weapons is not the same as possessing weapons. Bush and his advisers did not argue that the United States was compelled to go to war-rather than support more intrusive inspections-because Hussein had ongoing weapons programs; they claimed the United States had to invade because it was imminently threatened by actual weapons that were in Hussein's mitts (and that he could slip at any moment to his partners in al Qaeda).

Slowly, official material is seeping out that confirms the allegation that Bush and his national security crew misled the country into war. Last week, Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, referred to preliminary findings of a review being conducted by her committee. This examination, like Kerr's, has found that the intelligence analysts had attached caveats and qualifiers to their assessments of the WMD threat from Iraq (which Bush never bothered to mention) and that there had been no good intelligence linking Hussein with bin Laden. (Click here http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=783 to read more about her remarks.)

http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_6081.shtmlv
How did faulty intelligence find its way into a state of the union address and a UN briefing? How did so many smart people make the decision to go ahead with it, but more importantly, why?

The most plausible explanation is that (the Bush Administration) knew the reports were false and used them as a strategic maneuver regardless- from the President on down. What exactly am I alleging- that the President lied to the American public to achieve a narrow political gain. It's that simple. They knew, and they put it out there anyway, because they were counting on public apathy to overcome any credible questioning. They put it out there because once discovered, they felt they had the political cover, the plausible deniability (British intelligence) to cover their tracks. They put it out there because they knew that Americans, conservative Americans in particular, would not be willing to lay blame at the door of the President and ask for accountability. The hope is that I am wrong, and that conservatives who asked the tough questions about Bill Clinton's sexual escapades will now ask tougher questions about a President lying his way into an armed conflict, that has cost and continues to cost, countless lives.

The leader of the most powerful country in the world has led his nation into a war backed up by faulty information. Some of you out there may be comfortable with that; hopefully most of you are not. Today it was Iraq, tomorrow, who knows. What will you believe when this same leader tells you that the U.S. is in imminent danger of a nuclear missile strike and must act first? What if he says the intelligence points to it but is too sensitive to share? What will you believe? The President has opted to create a credibility gap, which is now in serious need of repair.

…..An important offshoot of this question, should (someone other than George) claim responsibility, is who is in charge in the Bush White House. If someone other than congress or the President can take the country to war by misrepresenting evidence, then what does this mean for Bush and the American public? How will they separate fact from fiction, when it all spews forth from the same source? It would seem that the President's advisors keep an awful lot from him (remember the denials after 911 that he had received any security briefings?). In so doing, they seem to be the ones dictating all the important domestic and foreign policy decisions. Is this the persona that the Bush Administration wishes to adopt- that anyone, other than the President, dictates the decisions and direction of the country?

It hardly exonerates Bush to claim the CIA, in the end, agreed not to protest the deception the White House pushed. But, astonishingly, that is precisely what the disgraceful George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell are now telling us.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html
Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His "Techniques of Deceit"
February 12, 2003 By Dennis Hans
President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy team have systematically and knowingly deceived the American people in order to gain support for an unprovoked attack on Iraq.

By the way, the Administration claims this war has nothing to do with the fact that Iraq "swims on a sea of oil" (to quote Paul Wolfowitz), but...
Iraq war WAS about the oil!

So were such documents used for truly innocent purposes? It'll be interesting to see the administration's and its backers' tortured explanations as to why the Task Force would have pondered over who held the contracts to Iraq's oil wealth.

Given the Iraq sanctions, those oil wells could not play any role in the formulation of US energy policy.

Chickenhawk George Says "Bring 'em On!" Even Though He Deferred From Viet Nam Duty Using Family Connections!

There are only two men alive today (outside the Bush family) who knew exactly how George Bush ducked the draft. Both men became high-powered Texas lobbyists. To an influence peddler, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth it's weight in gold - or, more precisely, there's a value in keeping the info secret.
-A report by Greg Palast

(kudos to Tom Brokaw and the other US network performers for maintaining their patriotically solemn expressions-even when our President, unlike experienced flyers, kept his parachute clips fastened under his crotch, making him look a little less like Tom Cruise and more like that first chimp in space.)

Here's what you won't see on US TV: Years back I got my hands on a copy of a document languishing in Justice Department files in Austin, Texas. In it, a tipster fingers two political friends of Bush Senior who, the source claimed, made the call to get young Bush out of the war and into the cockpit at the Air Guard. But the Feds could not act without corroboration. Now we have it. To the BBC crew, one of those named confessed to making the call - at Bush Senior's request - to help George W dodge the draft. (I've posted the letter at http://www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg).

former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, appears to have made lucrative use of his knowledge of our President's slithering out of the draft as a lever to obtain a multi-billion dollar contract for a client. The happy client paid Barnes, the keeper of Governor Bush's secret, a fee of over $23 million. Barnes, not surprisingly, denies that Bush took care of his client in return for Barnes' silence. However, confronted with the evidence, the former Lt. Governor now admits to helping the young George stay out of Vietnam….

on July 6, George W. Bush turned 57. William White was born the same day in 1946. I mention this because, if you're old enough, you'd remember that young men were drafted for Vietnam based on a grim lottery - if your birthday was picked out of a hat, you went. I got White's name off a black wall in Washington. He went to Vietnam when George W went to the Air Guard in Houston. White never came back. Happy birthday, Mr. President

Web Exclusives
July 3, 2003
Kangaroo Justice
(the Progressive)
The Bush Administration is using a system of kangaroo justice. It bounces from one legal designation to another in an effort to keep untried and unconvicted people penned up.

Bush has arrogated to himself the sole power to label someone an enemy combatant, and at the moment, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, both American citizens, are so designated. Al-Marri, who is not a citizen, is now the third in this dubious class.

By branding people enemy combatants, Bush has pulled an end-around the Constitution, which grants to all persons the right to due process of law and equal protection, as well as the right to an attorney and to a trial....

Could it be that when the government thinks its case is weak it just slaps the novel designation of "enemy combatant" on the person?

Global Eye -- Troubled Sleep
By Chris Floyd
"When you gonna wake up, and strengthen the things that remain?"
-- Bob Dylan
Illinois graduate student Ali al-Marri had been imprisoned since December 2001, after Ashcroft told his agents to round up "anyone with a Muslim-sounding name," the Village Voice reports. Held for months on minor charges, al-Marri, a Qatari national, was finally accused of being a "sleeper agent" -- again, on the say-so of the Qaida jokesters already in irons.

But al-Marri maintained his innocence, refusing to "cooperate" with Ashcroft's agents. So the Commander himself intervened, declaring the miscreant an "enemy combatant" -- although federal agents admitted he'd neither taken up arms against the United States nor planned any terrorist attacks, Knight-Ridder reports.

The charges against Faris and al-Marri might well be true. Or partly true. Or totally false. We'll never know -- because the entire process was sealed from public view. But whatever their actual degree of guilt or innocence, the prisoners have served their main purpose: advancing the Bush Regime's assault on the United States' dying constitutional republic. These cases are an important step in further habituating the American people to the idea of secret arrests, secret detentions, closed hearings and arbitrary rule by a militarized state apparatus -- much as the illegal invasion of Iraq has accustomed them to the idea of aggressive war, of murder in the name of corporate loot and extremist ideology. A new kind of American state is being forged, where arbitrary authority replaces law, and obedience outweighs liberty.

History has shown us this sad spectacle many times before: a people sleepwalking into tyranny and disaster. A people lulled into a stupor by alternating currents of fear and frivolity, afraid to cast off their comforting ignorance -- their willful ignorance -- of the crimes being committed in their name. Afraid to face the truth, afraid to fight the lies, afraid indeed to wake up -- and strengthen the things that remain.
References with links:
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/6136245.htm
American Public's False War Beliefs 'Striking,'
Twin Cities Pioneer Press, June 24, 2003

http://www.msnbc.com/news/931306.asp
Distorted Intelligence?" (second item)
Newsweek, June 25, 2003

http://www.washtimes.com
Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003 (fee required)

http://www.latimes.com
A U.S. License to Kill
Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11, 2003 (fee required)